Plastic People

In 2012 science writer Annie Murphy Paul published a summary of then-recent research into brain science and language called "This is Your Brain on Fiction." In it, she wrote, “The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.” Writer Mike Sowden referred to Paul’s article in his Nov 26, 2025, Substack Entry “Nothing Lies Like Your Own Memory.” Given research that calls into question the mind’s ability to unchangeably hold any memory and to resist bias and illusion, Sowden ultimately wonders what we even anchor ourselves in? “Without the sturdy edifice of our personal history to place ourselves in, how [can] we ever know who we are and where we belong? . . And if even our most fundamental memories [cannot] be trusted, where [does] that leave us?” Sowden goes on to talk about the vivid power of false memories, and how those who object most to the plasticity of memory are those most subject to it. He closes thus:

To avoid your personality flying to pieces, how about leaning into the findings of Annie Murphy Paul, and start regarding yourself not just as an amalgam and summation of your memories of everyone you’ve been and everything you’ve done (both of which may not be far less accessible to you than you think) - but as an ongoing story of your own continuous re-imagining. . . Identity is stories all the way down, and instead of feeling hemmed in and victimized by yours, how about acting like the author you actually seem to unconsciously be at the neuron-by-neuron level, with all of your self-rewritten components in the form of memories. How similar to who you’ve ended up are you to the person you want to be? What would that person be doing and how would they be acting? How about trying to add a few of those things until your fickle memory does its work and you completely forget you haven’t been like that until now?

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Mimesis: a short definition
Hermeneutics is love's desire to know